By Dr. Kate Scannell, Syndicated Columnist
First published in print: 10/19/2014

She jabbed her walking stick into the dirt path ahead, then she pulled her body forward. Her legs, paralyzed since childhood by polio, dragged behind. Over and over, she repeated this maneuver until, finally, she had arranged the corn she hoped to sell in front of her hut. A single mother, she needed the money to send her five children to school and buy their uniforms.

That is how community health workers found this woman during their outreach rounds through rural Kenya. Due to lack of mobility, she'd been isolated from health care and confined to a small area around her home. "It took her an average of 10 minutes for every 10 feet she could move along a path," said Gail Wagner, a Bay Area physician who founded the Tiba Foundation, which funded the outreach effort. “Can you imagine that?” she asked. (more…)

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